7 contemporary artists to watch: Igigo Wu, Marcus Soddano, Abel Kabel, Max Grote, Charlie Stein, Anji Woodley and Jonny Alexander. Selected by Munchies Art Club
7 artists who made us pause, rethink, and stay a little longer.
Alongside Erik Sommer’s official selection, we announced that a few more artists would be featured as part of our April Roundup.
Dominique Catherina Foertig
Erik Sommer´s selection of 15 Artist which caught his Eyes. Munchies Art club will dive deeper in every single artist this month
Not a second tier – just a second look.
These seven voices stood out during the review process: bold, unexpected, and impossible to ignore.
Selected by the Munchies Art Club team, these are our personal highlights.
We call it: Editor’s Choice – The Unofficial Selection.
You’ll call it: Followed.
Dominique Catherina Foertig
Showcase your work - Join the open calls - Tailored by Munchies Art Club
This Month, We Dive Deeper into the Worlds That Left a Mark
Abel Kabel – Raw Memory, Honest Form
Returning to Munchies Art Club with new emotional gravity, Abel Kabel’s latest works explore deeply personal terrain—abandonment, addiction, heartbreak, and gender transition.
Working through a period of rupture, Kabel treats painting as both witness and therapy, using intuition to give shape to experiences too raw to stage.
Dominique Catherina Foertig
👉 Read more about Abel kabel´s art practice here
The result is a body of work that feels lived-in, vulnerable, and entirely unfiltered.
Max Grote – Drama, Doubt, and a Ruff Collar
Max Grote paints himself—again and again. His self-portraits balance between existential weight and visual wit, confronting body image, vulnerability, and art-world absurdities with a ruffled nod to medieval fashion.
Beneath the irony, Grote navigates real darkness: recurring thoughts of death, heartbreak, and rebirth. His canvas is a mirror, but one with drama, costume, and emotional bite.
Marcus Soddano – Between Myth and Motion
Marcus Soddano’s paintings vibrate with energy, balancing the figurative and the abstract through intuitive gestures in oil and oilstick.
Inspired by mythology, fables, and raw nature, his forms emerge like creatures caught mid-transformation—anchored in emotion, yet slipping into dream.
These works don’t just depict; they radiate, acting as portals between worlds both known and imagined.
Up-Coming: Solo - «Blowing kisses» @annikanuttallgallery April 25.
Igigo Wu – Painting as Portal, Body as Terrain
Taiwanese artist Igigo Wu, based between Zürich and Vienna, merges painting, theatre, and video into a multidisciplinary cosmos of haunted geographies and embodied histories.
In her practice, painting becomes a political body—activated, animated, and entangled in the atmospheric weight of memory.
Echoing earth-bound spirits (地縛靈), Wu’s works invoke colonial ghosts, fragmented timelines, and the silent spaces in between.
What emerges is a language beyond words—where identity dissolves and history breathes.
Charlie Stein – Bodies, Surfaces, and Other Projections
We can’t wait to feature Charlie Stein’s work in more depth on Munchies Art Club. Whether through silicone, avatars, or inflatable fashion, her practice dissects how bodies are packaged, sold, and seen.
Stein’s figures become surfaces—shiny, fluid, performative—blurring the line between desire and object, visibility and erasure. A sharp take on the politics of presence in a hyper-commercial world.
Anji Woodley – On Memory, Thought, and the Things We Let Go
Toronto-based artist Anji Woodley, originally from South Africa, invites us into the quiet architecture of memory.
Her painting Stewards of Thought reflects on the fleeting, intangible nature of our inner lives—what we remember, what slips away, and how we hold space for both.
It’s a poetic meditation on mental landscapes and the emotional weight of forgetting.
Jonny Alexander – Painting Relief Into the Landscape
Jonny Alexander’s work is rooted in the gentle power of emotional relief.
Through grounded, almost mythic figures set in luminous landscapes, he explores themes of comfort, care, and quiet rituals.
Each painting becomes a place of pause—offering space to reflect, reconnect, and breathe.
That Makes 22. And You Could Be Next.
These 7 artists, selected by the Munchies Art Club team, join Erik Sommer’s official picks to complete our April–May showcase of 22 outstanding positions in contemporary art.
Dominique Catherina Foertig
Erik Sommer selection for April (from our open call)
If you want to be part of the next roundup and have your work seen, our new Open Call is now open.
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